Saturday, March 8, 2014

"Fated and Fateless" Excerpt Part 1

The book excerpt that I'm going to post consists of almost a full chapter. As it is too long for one post, I've split it into two parts. This post contains Excerpt Part 1.

[The last thought
on her mind, as she climbed out of the Mercedes, was that she needed to
advertise for a personal assistant, or maybe two, on the first day she started
to work at the office.

Diana had never
quite gotten over the spat she had had with Wendy when they were kids. She had
never forgiven Wendy for ruining her new pink frock that day. She had the nerve
to say it was my fault! She wondered where Wendy was working now, and how she was
making out.

“Whatever income
she may be earning, I can always give her an offer she can’t refuse.” The
corners of her lips turned up in a sly smile with this thought.

The next
morning, which was a Sunday, she had a chance to have a long chat with her mother
at the breakfast table, her father having already gone out to the Deep Water
Bay Golf Club to play golf and Edward was doing his daily laps in the terrace
pool.

In the Lee
family’s Sai Wan Ho days, Chuen Fat Kee had been used as a cover for a big
word-guess gaming (字花) operation which was run by Ah Chuen and Ah Fat. The
brothers had come from Chiu Chow like Mr. Lee. Being a sociable and astute
businessman, Mr. Lee had found out about the operation during his casual chats
with the brothers. He had offered to inject capital into the operation to make
it bigger, using his commission earnings from broking land deals. Immigrants
from Chiu Chow had a natural habit of sticking trustingly to one another. The
brothers had accepted his offer without hesitation. Two years into the
operation, Mr. Lee had suggested to the brothers to start a horse-racing bookie
business alongside word-guess game betting. The party of three had it so good
ever since that they were virtually swimming in cash.

The word-guess
game was a game in which thirty-six names of well-known ancients, or of places,
or of animals or profession, were put up for betting on a daily basis. Each
operator would have a number of couriers who acted as collectors of bets from
street gamblers. Each morning the operator would announce by word-of-mouth to
the couriers which group of names would be put up for betting that day and
would write up numbers in running order against the thirty-six names on a piece
of paper. He would randomly pick one number (name) by marking it and would then
put the piece of paper inside a porcelain container that would be hung from the
beam of the flat. Bets could then be accepted by the couriers. The payout
multiple for the winner was thirty to one. Thus, the odds are heavily in favor of
the dealer. Such operations were illegal gaming and had to be conducted
underground. The flip side to running such operations was that it would often
attract triad members as well as policemen to come around to collect protection
fees and bribes.

Now Diana
remembered when she was in primary school, her father had a habit of placing
before her each day a list of numbers and Chinese names and would urge her to
pick out a number or name on the paper. Ever since she took on the job of “the
gold finger”, money was flowing in faster than her father could ever have hoped
for. It was thus that she became her father’s good luck charm.

As the
underground operation was bringing in more and more cash, it had caught the
attention of the Wo Sing Wo triad gang. Gangsters had begun coming round to
extort protection fees from Ah Chuen and Ah Fat. By a stroke of chance, the
brothers had got acquainted with a police detective named Ngan from the vice
squad attached to the Shaukiwan Police Station. Ngan had also come from Chiu
Chow and once he came to know the brothers, they just hit it off in no time.
Ever since they had befriended each other, gangsters had stopped showing up.
But of course there was no free lunch. Instead of paying ever increasing
protection fees on demand to triad gangsters, the brothers and Mr. Lee had had
to allow Ngan a cut of the gaming profits. Diana had picked up much of this
information from the chauffeur Ah Wong during her car trips to and from the
airport on her annual vacations. Ah Wong was a second cousin of Ah Chuen and Ah
Fat. Her mother now confirmed those stories.

When the Lee
family had first moved to Repulse Bay in 1960, they had settled into a 2,000
square feet apartment unit which Mr. Lee had bought with the hard cash that he
earned from his underground business. Then in 1970, they had moved again into
the huge 4,000 square feet, two-storey beachside mansion, which had a large
manicured garden at the back and a sun terrace with a full-size swimming pool
at the front facing the beach. By this time, Ah Chuen and Ah Fat had also moved
out of Sai Wan Ho to live in a luxury apartment on The Peak. Together, the
brothers were now the second largest shareholder in Sun Tai Land, although they were content to
leave the day-to-day management of the company in the hands of Mr. Lee.

Starting from
the early 60s, Mr. Lee had begun to focus his time on buying land for his own
company and building low-end residential buildings in urban Kowloon for the newly arrived mainland
immigrants. The business had taken off in no time and he had begun to look for
land in the New Territories. In 1967, the communists in Hong Kong had started up a riot that had threatened to
turn uncontrollable, which had scared a lot of rich people into running for
cover overseas. The unexpected exodus had given Mr. Lee and a couple of other
gutsy developers, including the Lee family’s current neighbor Mr. Ko, a golden
chance to load up their land banks at negligible costs, when land and housing
prices had taken a dive.]